Thursday, February 23, 2012

An Open Letter to the Kids

It Gets Better.Dan Savage, Ke$ha, Kathy Griffin, Perez Hilton, Hillary Clinton, Jason Derulo, Neil Patrick Harris, President Obama and countless others have made videos telling you this; you've been hearing it all year, from people older than you who have already arrived at that magical, mystical land of "Better", but maybe you're not there yet. And this is about Now, right?

I know - it's not "Better" right now. Sometimes "right now" just sucks.

I don't know you - you could be gay, bi, lesbian - you could be trans trying to figure out where you fit on that whole spectrum, you could be questioning who you are, who you love - hell, you could even be straight - I don't know you....

But I've been there, too.

I've been on the bad side of a fist to the face. I've gotten my head put through a window for being "different"...and it sucked. Haters have been around since...well, since EVER, and honestly - I don't know if we'll ever be able to get rid of them entirely. It would be nice, but most likely, there's always gonna be someone who despises "different".

Haters are gonna hate; you sure as hell don't need Daddy to tell you that.

I'll tell you something though - in the end, the haters of this world don't win. I know - it feels like they're gonna win - it always feels like that. Any time real social change has come about, it has always felt like a lost cause...until it won. In the end, human beings want to help people more than we want to cause pain. We want to love more than we want to hate. Creation is always more rewarding than destruction. Hate is backward thinking; Love is forward thinking. You have to keep moving forward.

The Right Wing thinks that your generation is lazy; that you're a bunch of slackers with no direction just looking for a handout. They think that they can not only deprive you of rights that they take for granted, but try to further limit those rights that you already have. Why? Because they don't like who you are. And they don't think you'll fight back.

Well, you have to fight. Y'know why it gets better? Because of all those brave folks that fought to get to where we are today. The Mattachine Society, Harvey Milk, Lee Brewster, Sylvia Rivera, Michael Callen, Audre Lorde, Christine Jorgensen, the patrons of Compton's Cafeteria, the brave Kings and Queens of the Stonewall riots and way too many other people to mention here - our society is where it is today because these people, these amazing people, stood up to the hate and fought to make a place for themselves in this world. Now it's your turn. If you're at the bottom right now...if you feel like things just couldn't get any worse and you couldn't fall down any further...then there's no where to go but up. Take a minute, take a breath - get some sleep and wake up tomorrow ready to move forward. Ready to make your way. Some days it won't happen. Some days will feel like you're going backwards. But you'll get there - you'll get to that magical, mystical place called "Better" - if you keep fighting, if you keep trying...

If you keep waking up to a new tomorrow.

Please don't give up. Please, please don't let the Haters win. I know that life might be Hell for you right now. But, as someone once said,

"When you're going through Hell...keep going."

The video below is a song by a group called XELLE - they'll be donating proceeds of this song to GLSEN, who will be putting that money to work in their efforts to ensure that schools are safe for every student, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity/expression. Listen. Buy. Support.